Wednesday, February 13, 2008
One bad apple spoils the bunch
Bloomberg.com: Exclusive
Trading is a surprisingly egalitarian pursuit. A high degree of street smarts (being able to "smell fear") is often one's best ally. Although there are many more complex quantitative strategies in use today, recruiting exclusively from the fancy schools is a poor strategy. And, by the way, all those fancy quant strategies aren't covered in glory, are they?
Jerome Kerviel's unauthorized trading at Societe Generale SA ruined the chances of French bank clerks getting promoted to the trading floor, headhunters say.Of all the controls to be put in place after such a debacle, this one strikes me as..convenient rather than effective.
French traders are typically recruited from the elite ``Grandes Ecoles,'' such as the HEC School of Business on the outskirts of Paris, not the University of Lyon II, where Kerviel earned a Masters degree in banking support, the recruiters said. Societe Generale said Kerviel's knowledge of the bank's control systems allowed him to hide 50 billion euros in bets on European stock index futures.
Trading is a surprisingly egalitarian pursuit. A high degree of street smarts (being able to "smell fear") is often one's best ally. Although there are many more complex quantitative strategies in use today, recruiting exclusively from the fancy schools is a poor strategy. And, by the way, all those fancy quant strategies aren't covered in glory, are they?
1 Comments:
By 
Christopher Chambers, at
Wed Feb 13, 01:11:00 PM:
Then again, the guy who helped ruin Barings Bank in Singapore (played brilliantly by Ewan MacGregor in "Rogue Trader") was also "working class," and indeed that was seen as a quaint and interesting change by the upper crust tools who were his supervisors and the bank's directors...
